My head is pounding from the heat at Phu Bai. I am sitting in the small relief of shade next to one of the Hueys, breathing the sharp smell of the oil that they have sprayed to keep the dust down on the chopper pad. I am drinking water and sweating it out as fast as I consume it. We cannot break for the coolness that the huts offer because we are waiting for the word to crank up and load.
We arrived here two days ago to line up for a mission to find a pipeline they believe the NVA are extending down from the North to carry fuel for the next big offensive. Our air superiority has kept their logistics interdicted, or so everyone thought, with the minimum of supplies getting through to the units down south. For 90 days now, the Air Force has been killing more and more trucks on the main hardball of the trail. Many times the flashes of secondary explosions indicate they hit vehicles carrying fuel or munitions.
Of course, the Air Force chortles away saying that they are diminishing the enemy’s capability to wage a major offensive and that they have destroyed his ability to project his force outside his strong points. If you are to believe the zoomies, it should be safe to assume that we will be able to retake most of the Central Highlands and sweep north and secure the northern provinces of South Vietnam, safe enough that one can go for a stroll in the A Shau and never see anything more dangerous than the odd hornet or two. Not the case. We, and our counterparts in Kontum, are getting pressed every time we try to get into the target areas.
Our targets that are normally hot are becoming impossible to get into. There is more and more heavy stuff being thrown up at us, not just 12.5mm, but multiple 37mm and 57mm anti-aircraft guns are being used, as well. To a slow moving helicopter there is only one way to get away from it and that is to get low and hug the earth. And that puts you down where the 12.5mms will tear you into Grandma’s ribbons.
We had tried to insert yesterday and were flying nap of the earth, right off the tree tops, and it looked like a steady stream of green tracers coming up from at least seven different gun positions at that level. There’d also been a couple of 37mms tracking the fast movers as they tried to silence the guns and blow a hole that we could maneuver into before the enemy could fill it with hunter-killer teams.
All the way in we watched the air battle. The Cobras were jinking and trying to provide the slicks with cover, barely keeping up with the wall of lead that was being thrown at us. As soon as they would nail a gun position, another would open up somewhere else.
When we got set to flash into the primary LZ, the ground fire got even more intense. We aborted to try the secondary, which was a small clearing about 1500 meters higher up the ridge. Same story, too hot to get in. Every bird took hits; two barely made it back through the keyhole before crashing in a riverbed and we had to use the chase bird to pick up the crews. There is nothing that smells quite as bad as when the bird that you are on is burning somewhere in its innards. There is nowhere to go, and if the fuel cells ignite the choices are fry or take the long plunge.
Mac and most of the Yards were on the lead slick and the Cookie, two Yards, and I were on the second. As we popped up to abort on the secondary, the lead slick got pinned by a 12.5mm and the force of the slugs hammering into it caused it to slew sideways. The pilot broke right and the enemy gun crew couldn’t catch up. Then the pilot of our bird did a roller coaster dip that left my stomach hanging where we were, and the gun overshot us as well. The next 15 minutes were the worst I have had on one of these inserts. We were constantly slewing, dipping, and jinking around in the air as we tried not to fly in formation. That way, if they shot at one bird and missed they wouldn’t get the next one by default.
The pilots must’ve been connected to one central nervous system because we barely miss about ten midair collisions and then we are out of the heaviest of it. A Phantom got nailed coming past us dropping CBU on the slopes to our port side. There were a series of airbursts from a 57mm gun and the F-4 erupted into a rolling ball of wreckage that splashed the side of the ridgeline. It was horrifyingly beautiful as we watched the bright, almost white center of the burning comet blowing out into angry orange-red petals of burning fuel and aircraft, just before it made impact with the lush green hillsides.
We passed the wreck and everyone is screaming in the headset, asking if anyone saw an ejection or chutes, but it all happened so fast. It was a great, sleek, fast-moving bird of prey one instant, and in the next it was a bright phoenix before it became a greasy black scar in the forest below. The rest of us limped back to the launch site. Mac’s bird didn’t quite make it and had to set down about five klicks out. We spent the rest of the day pulling everything back together.
Since then, there has been no sign or word from the F-4 crew and it is assumed that they splashed in with their aircraft. If they did eject they were only about 700 feet above ground level. Not a lot of time between your chute opening and being skewered on the trees. Everyone who is connected with SAR (Search and Rescue) is listening for someone to come up on the emergency frequency. So far no one has come up. The air over the target is too dangerous to linger so they have Moonbeam offset, listening. Until then, the decision has been made that no Bright Light will go in on the crash site or area. If we know they are alive we will go back and risk as many as it takes to get the poor bastards out, but not until there is some indication that we have a live one.
We started this fiasco because of all the assurances from space command that they were crippling the will of the enemy and their ability to wage war. Nguyen shot that story to hell in a hand basket when a trail FAC caught three T-54 Soviet tanks crossing the Song Ba on a submerged bridge in broad daylight, well, just before dusk. They opened up on him with their turret machine guns, and then columned right into a heavy stand of triple canopy on the other side. In the brief moment in which he was able to get a good look at them, he managed to get an oblique shot of them with his camera. Saigon initially denied that the FAC had seen “mediums” this far south and said they had to be PT-76’s, but they developed the film and, sure enough, they were T-54s.
Another thing came to light from the film: there were no external fuel drums on the 54s. If they weren’t carrying the 55-gallon external feeds, they had to have a fuel dump close enough to get to in their regular tanks. That meant fuel depots, or something else. These babies were so far off the map from the main hardball that could support their weight that someone came to the conclusion that while the Air Force was chasing trucks over in one area, the other team had built a totally separate road system to the east of it.
If the trail FAC hadn’t caught them at just that moment, no one would have been any the wiser. The fact that these were medium tanks and were this far south was bad news. The increase in anti-aircraft coverage over the target areas was making all the analysts start to scream what we had been surmising for the last six months: things are going to get a whole lot worse.
We had been trying to insert teams all over the suspected concentrations, with very limited success. The type of activity that we had come to expect north and west in the DMZ was now becoming commonplace further south. I loved the target briefs that we were getting: “It is considered that the likelihood of denser concentrations of enemy units can be expected in these target areas.” No shit, Sherlock. When these boys had something they didn’t want you to get at, they threw A A on all the high points. And if they started layering it by caliber, then go back to your organizational charts, Nerd Control, and see who carries 57mms around with them.
This wasn’t the Home Guard. This was a buildup for a full-on push, to sucker punch us right on our can. Those of us who had survived the ‘68 Tet were wont to be a little leery of believing that the countryside was pacified. The Air Force, for all its wonderful “you don’t have to clean it after” weapons, wasn’t going to stamp out anything, but possibly VD infections in Salinas, California.
But back to the basic equation: tanks have to have fuel and if they aren’t getting it from dolly carts with drums, then they have to have it piped to them. The pipeline is something that the Air Force can interdict if we can find it. But with all these clanking pill boxes wandering around, you can’t just grab the nearest high ground and call in air to chop up their formations. No, with tanks they can set back and direct-fire your rosy red ass into tea biscuits and letters of regret. And with tanks come troops, lots and lots of angry, hard-core, well-led, let’s-kill-us-somebody troops. Tanks. I hate tanks.
We try every trick in the book, offsets, false insertions, and walk downs. None do any good. If someone gets in, they are shot out. If a team gets on the ground, within a short space of time they have someone on you, and then it’s the dance. They pour more and more troops in and start to canalize you. Soon you run out of terrain and stamina.
Once a team goes to ground and gets static, they bring in more people and you’re dead meat.
There are three teams here now and two on the ground. The three of us waiting for a shot at the title are running Bright Light for the ones that tried to get in, or are trying now. One team got in this morning and is already running, and another is being inserted or trying to insert as the first team extracts. We are standing by to go in and pick up downed air crews, or if we have to, fight our way in to rescue one or both teams. I hate this; I have never seen such willingness to give us birds.
They must have every ash and trash bird that can be scraped up, either here, at the refueling point, or out over the target. That means inexperienced crews. These are people that have never flown our type of missions, and more importantly, people that are soft. We normally get our Phu Bai air packages from the 101st or from the Marines. We have composite groups here, patch-together units with maybe one crew from our normal package, and two or three crews that have probably been flying Donut Dollies and club runs.
We are lucky in that the one crew, in the lead position with each of our lifts, has taken the riffraff aside and tried to explain what to expect and how to fly the envelope. I can see that they are just as apprehensive and disgusted as we are. The other crews range from attitudes of “no way Jose,” to excitement about being in a real combat situation. Neither is good; both will get all of us killed when reflex experience means life or death. This is insane, but we have people on the ground, our people. If they get slammed we will go, and these flying clusterfucks will get some real quick OJT (on the job training) on what it means to fly into the tiger’s mouth.
This is why I hate Phu Bai: good Coveys, bad missions. The Saigon pencil-necks don’t know how to say “no.” There are far too many of us up here, and their answer is more choppers. We could fly these with a Chinook from the Marines. That means one bird instead of three. If they were going to do anything, why not get more gunships instead of more inexperienced slick drivers? The Chinook will take a lot of punishment before it falls out of the sky. And, if you go down, everyone is in one area. You get three slicks down; that’s twelve crew in at least three locations, plus whoever was on the bird with them.
But the idiots want dispersion because of the AA and ground fire, which is another thing. Want to find the pipeline, suppress the ground fire, and see what’s on the ground? There are enough prime indicators like heavy flak and fire, tanks, and in-depth dispersion to know there are a lot of folks on the ground. So pull us out, ring up the mighty Air Force, and have them dust off a couple of 12 ship Arc Light missions from Guam or NKP. They can fly at 25,000 feet; get a pedicure en route, and open the bomb bay doors over the targets. There won’t be enough oxygen in the air for 30 minutes to resuscitate a frog. Then they can turn around, get back in time for cocktails at the “O” club and come back and do it again.
This is a waste of good men’s lives and we know it. Somewhere, up the chain, is someone who is using us to further his career. We are stretched to the point of murderous despair.
The one good thing that has come out of all this is the Cookie. He is perfect, cool, calm, hard-core, and easy to be around. He loves the Yards and they love him. He has taken everything in stride and has wedded himself to us and become part of the “animal.” I don’t have to worry about where he is and what he is going to do. And this boy can throw an M-67 baseball grenade like it was shot from a cannon. Our only problem is going to be convincing Manes that both he and I are too stupid to be left alone so we can all stay together, which is another part of the case of red ass I have about this whole fiasco. If they lose teams they are going to want to start making One-Zeroes out of those of us who have been here for a while. I know I can do it, but I am at home on Habu. We never turn down a mission; we always go and pull our load, so we are always running.
We get the crank up signal. Shit, here comes more bad news. They are cranking up two lifts. The Operations NCO comes running over and grabs us. We go to the TOC shack and we can hear the radios squawking the situation both in the air and on the ground. My intuition when the call came in to get cranked up is correct. The attempt to extract one team and insert the other had gone terribly wrong.
Just as the ships were inbound the team on the ground had been hit and hit hard. The NVA had been shadowing them with trackers and had finally brought up enough anti- recon forces to jump them right on the LZ. They were pinned down in a bomb crater and four of their little people were dead. Both Americans were wounded, with the One-One wounded so badly he wasn’t expected to make it.
The second team had come in behind the gun sets, lighting up the LZ with rockets and nails, which had driven the NVA to ground. They had become a Bright Light mission at that point and had managed to start getting the first of the wounded on the lead ship. As the second ship came in preparing to land, the first started to lift. It never cleared the ground. Hit by heavy ground fire, it was lying on its side with the rotors busted all to hell and they had no way to clear it off the LZ. The second ship veered off and gained altitude. Now they had the original team and half of another one on the ground. In addition, two of the chopper crew were seriously wounded. This left three Americans not wounded, two of whom were air crew, plus six little people to care for four seriously wounded. Not good math, they couldn’t move those people to another area and fight at the same time. The other half of the team was too small to act effectively as a Bright Light, so we were going to try and make a “hail Mary” play and get them out.
The plan is brutal and simple. Covey thinks he can blow us an LZ near the original one to insert on and then extract from. He will lay a set of fast movers in with 250-pounders and blow down enough flora to get a halfway usable LZ in place. The only other area that can be used for an LZ is over a klick and a half away. That is much too far away for us to fight our way to the team and then extricate them with their wounded. They are working the area over around the team and have taken the pressure off, at least for the time being. The survivors are in a good spot, most of them in two bomb craters, with no way for the NVA to get direct fire on them. The four dead little people are only about 20 meters from the larger of the two craters. We want to have Covey bring in the fast movers and blow a patch of slope below the team clear, so we can insert and make our way up to them. No sense having to drag wounded uphill. Between adrenalin and stress, we are going to be shagged by the time we get to them, anyway.
They are in a good position to have the planes work the ordnance that close. Most of our guys have called stuff in on themselves as close as this before. I’m sure for the survivors of the flight crew it is going to be an eye opener, though. If we can get the Air Force to be precise, we will have a usable flat piece of property that we can hover over and do what has to be done. We are rigging the choppers with ladders so that, if necessary, we can climb down or hook in on the way back. This will save a lot of time. The bombs will shatter the trees but not blow them completely down. There will be huge shattered trunks sticking up like spears, so we prepare for any contingencies in that regard.
The other team is getting fired up as well; if we get into trouble they will be our Bright Light. It’s Jimmy, who is from the swamps and bayous of Louisiana and his running mate, a full-blooded Sioux, Fred. Both are tough, competent sergeants, if not a bit odd.
We organize the rescue by drill. We will go in after they prep and create the LZ. Covey comes on station to say that they are blasting a hole for us to use and it’s about 100 meters down-slope, almost where we designated. We are going to go in and move as quickly as we can up to where the team is using the gunships and air assets to pound the area around them.
Our plan is to have the gunships do 360-coverage around and on the LZ, and work the area over well between the team and the LZ. They have 17-pound rockets and nails, which should kill or wound anyone stupid enough to try and get in-between. The NVA are going to try and get right on top of the team to escape this fire or they are going to withdraw. Covey says the team is taking fire from the northwest, which is beyond our line of march from the LZ to the two craters where the team is holed up. Mac and I will handle the tactical movement and the fighting; Cook will organize getting the wounded ready to go and keeping them in the center.
After we assess their condition and get them ready, the Americans will handle the American wounded, as far as carrying them, and we will use the Yards not on our team to fill in. We will use the two aircrew members to help carry the wounded. We have enough manpower to take the Yard dead out with us. We get lucky and get one of the chase medics to go on the ground with us. He can patch and save, which gives us more brawn to get the wounded the 100 meters or so to the LZ.
In about 15 minutes we are rigged and lifting. Nervous grins, a couple of thumbs up, and we are off. Mac has the lead bird again. We will move like we always do, him at the head, me at the tail, the chase medic and Cook in the center. There are all kinds of aircraft working the AO (Area of Operations), you can see them stacking up over the orbit point. There is a pall of smoke, the dull gray-black of HE (high explosives), and there are white scars amidst the green of the bush. That is the bomb strike; the white is chewed up trees. We can see a long pattern of old pock marks that denotes an old Arc Light scar. About midway is the shattered wreckage of the Huey, and near it are the two craters sheltering the team. There is a fresh scar slightly to the left of it, and that is our LZ. It looks pretty good; they must have laid two racks almost on top of each other. There is a shattered and mangled patch of forest cover about 30 yards wide and 100 yards long along the east-west axis of the ridgeline.
The climb uphill is going to be a ball-buster. The terrain is not steep, but it is uphill and the LZ is a jumble of shattered tree trunks and collapsed portions of the upper branches all enmeshed together. The best area is right next to two slate gray holes about 20 feet across. Whoever did this was thinking. The blast pushed most of the debris down-slope so we don’t have to pick our way through it. Mac will have to keep the guns working this area because if the bad guys get in there we will have to fight them in that twisted mass of wreckage.
Mac’s ship settles in, and they jump at about six feet. The slick can’t set down because there is a jagged spear of a tree about ten feet high that makes it impossible. The shattered tree is about 15 inches in diameter. I have four, five-pound ring mains of TNT spread out amongst the team just for that situation. As soon as we land we will set those and blow them as we move off so that when we come back we can load the wounded on and not have to hang on the ladder with them.
My slick is last. We come in and flare, and everyone jumps. There are a few rocks, but the ground is torn up and there’s not very much debris so everyone makes a relatively soft landing. We are down and the ship moves off, while the guns are working the slope between the team and us. Mac points at two jagged stumps and yells over at me to get them down. No sweat. I run over with one of the Yards, place the TNT on both sides by sliding it down the knot of detonation cord that connects the two, wrap it with a parachute line to secure it to the tree, and prime it with a claymore detonator. I use the same procedure with the other. It’s a little tight on the second one, but it ends up where we can all get down behind the remains of a large tree that is on its side. We tell Covey we are going to torch it and to get all the guns to lay off. Mac gives me the signal and I blow them. The whole thing is over, from placing the charges to blowing them, in little more than five minutes. I look up and we now have an LZ where the birds can set down.
Mac gets on the horn and says to keep the Pink Team on us as we move up. I have to give it to the guys that fly the Loaches on a Pink Team; they can make that little bird do wondrous things. It is ahead of us right at tree top level, slow hover forward. He is trying to draw fire if there is any, so the two Cobras above and behind him can deal with it. The rest of the guns are taking “targets of opportunity” as Covey calls them up.
Laboriously, we move as fast as we can, expecting a fight as we move up-slope. The Loach opens up with its Minigun and then fires a white phosphorous rocket about 60 yards up the slope to our left. The radio crackles and Mac signals three guys, machine gun. Then the guns roll in and they paste the area over. We get the “all clear” and start moving again. The area ahead of us is chewed up by the guns, but Cook sights three bodies and a gun, and points them out. We can hear the remnants of the first team, firing an occasional burst, answered by a few bursts from AKs uphill and beyond them, but the gunships are working everything over.
We have Covey tell the team we are coming in, and when we break out into the old bomb scar, some 20 meters ahead, there they are. We quickly move up and form a perimeter. The medic goes to work on the wounded. It’s bad, three of them are too shot up to walk and the One-One is dead. That’s five bodies and three wounded. We pull all the bodies into one hole where the medic is working on the ones that can make it. We are pairing up the Americans to get the wounded out. We drop the wounded on a poncho and make a sling-carry so we can piggyback the worst wounded of the helicopter crew. We will use the chopper crew for that. They won’t be of any use in a firefight, so better to use them to mule the wounded.
Cook and I move over to the downed Huey, and try to jimmy open the hatch where the secure voice equipment is. It is gone. We run back over to the team and find out that one of the crew has pulled it already. It will go out, also. The Yards from the other teams get the bodies. We call the guns back and move downhill, keeping pace with the slowest man.
There is solid gun work by the fast movers and Cobras. They keep the enemy out of our corridor and flanks. Just before we get there, a fast mover napalms the LZ and we move down through the smoke. The choppers are coming in.
The wounded get thrown on the first bird with the chase medic. The next takes the downed crew survivors and two Yards from the first team. The third comes in and takes the half of the first Bright Light. The next takes the dead and one Yard; another Cookie and me and the three Yards from our end; the last takes Mac and the remainder of the team. We are lifting and pulling free of the trees. As Mac lifts off, the ground fire picks up and his bird takes a number of hits, but stays in the air. We start east to the launch site. Covey tells everything that hasn’t got fuel enough to stay long on the target area to drop their ordnance on the downed bird.
We come slipping back into Phu Bai and we are down. Everything winds down and the team goes back to the huts. That’s it for the day. The kid that didn’t make it and the dead Yards have to be taken care of. We always have our people strip the bodies of equipment and make them ready for the medics to take to the morgue. The Yard dead are put in a freezer. They will get the customary trip back to the home village, accompanied by the surviving Yards and someone from Recon if none of the American team members are able to make it. It is the last measure of respect from us to their tribe and to them. These were all Rhade, so someone will be going to Ban Me Thuot with the bodies. Cook and I go over to the hospital and are stripping the One-One of his equipment and all operational papers. The kid had a silenced twenty-two on him when we rolled him on the bird, but it isn’t there now. The helicopter crew wouldn’t take anything off our dead; they are like us and that’s a “no-no.” If they wanted something like that, they know all they have to do is ask, at least that’s true of all the normal packages. You don’t know about the plug-ins. Maybe one of them took it.
Cookie goes ballistic, grabs the head orderly of the morgue by the throat, and tells him all the terrible things he’s going to do to him if he doesn’t produce the pistol. The guy is pissing his pants and swears he hasn’t touched anything. The hospital staff knows they are to wait until we get there.
We make the ride back to the launch site with me driving, two Yards in the back, and the Cookie Monster fuming and inventing some really innovative profanity dealing with ghouls the whole way back. We get to the launch site and the jeep isn’t done rolling before he is out and headed for the helicopter package. Mac, Jimmie and Fred look at me. I just shrug. If those guys thought the mission was tough, they are in for a real ass-tightener. Best to let the Cookie work it out of his system. He is a Ranger after all; they have some sort of mechanism that sets off their release valves. They are kind of like Marines on denatured alcohol and too much testosterone.
This has been one bad day all around. The problems will start all over again tomorrow because the mission to find the elusive fuel supply is still a priority. The new administration at Phu Bai has actually pulled all this together quite well. I still don’t like the place. It gives me the heebie-jeebies. I hope we can move it to Quang Tri. At least there Pappy will be running the show, and we might have a better chance of surviving. Well, surviving the mission. Pappy is still pissed off at us for our last foraging foray. We stole a Conex container full of canned sauerkraut, and now he has to use it as the main entree for three meals a day. If we go north we’d better do some judicious trading with the Navy or someone, and show up with steaks, or the Buffalo will find some way to insert us by bicycle.
The Cookie comes back and he has the silenced twenty-two with him. Along with him is a rather sheepish warrant officer. He is from our regular air package. We get a very sincere apology along with the promise that the crew member that had taken the pistol will never do anything like that again. I guess the Cookie pretty much beat the snot out of him, and in the process scared the shit out of everybody. The gun doesn’t mean crap to us; it is the thought that someone would ghoul the bodies. The guys that normally fly with us feel the same. This had been a patch crew; they just didn’t know any better. The guy saw a neat bit of kit and lifted it, figuring no one would care.